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These five days course on the Application of Geographical Information System(GIS) on marine and coastal field was attended by 33 participants from 13 French speaking African countries such as Benin, Cameroon, Congo, DR Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Morocco, Madagascar, Mauritania, Senegal, Togo and Tunisia and took place from 16th to 20th January 2017 in ISRA, Dakar, Senegal within the framework of IOC/IODE/ Ocean Teacher Global Academy (OTGA).

Group Photo - Course Opening Session

The course started with the opening ceremony by the Scientif ic Director of ISRA and attended by the representative of IOC national focal point , the Ministry of Marine Fishery and Maritime Economy ( MPEM)as well as representatives of keys marine institutions.

Participants were scientists, data managers from NODCs and marine and coastal institutions as well as Master and PH-D students in marine related disciplines . The lecturers were from Senegal (OTGA- Candidate- RTC-Staff) and Tunisia ( INTSM) and Madagascar ( IHSM).

This course which has been conducted in French provided an introduction of the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping and analyses to the marine environment using of open source software such as SAGA, ODVmp, Arc Explorer, HDF View and GEBCO on the one hand and resources (data) from several sources: World Ocean Data 2013 (WOD13) , World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), NOAA NVODS COADS, NGDC, eWOCE, Nationale, etc.

Training room (ISRA, Dakar, Senegal)

The objectives of the training were:

Provide an introduction of GIS for marine applications;

Focus on commonly used marine and coastal data sets;

Show the many potential applications of GIS in coastal and marine environnment.

Core tasks involved in the GIS analysis process including data acquisition, management, manipulation and analysis, and presentation and output

Creating and editing spatial data

Appreciation of coastal and marine GIS data applications

Practical exercises have been done by the trainees a long the workshop. To compile with the principle of IOC/IODE/ OTGA course, the main resources of the course are available online at OTGA online platform.